Of Patterns and Loops

The days are darkening, chilling. As if to go out with a bang, the sunsets now are breath-taking, vivid pink and gold, slices of brilliant turquoise against heavy cloud banks. Leaves fall, mustard yellow, ochre orange, and grow damp with rain. Berries sit quietly on branches, waiting for the incoming hungry. Twelve jars of rowan jelly sit on my fridge, orange-red as a sunset, sweet and wild with a tart, face-shrivelling aftertaste. Mist rises, spider-webs shimmer. Geese fly south, their throng a small victory in an enormous sky.

Other victories are rising, too, their ways paved with the bittersweet taste of learning. As I make the jellies and casseroles I listen, again, to Elizabeth Strout’s novel Tell Me Everything, which kept me company a year ago while sick and sickening; and I marvel at how, this time, I can cook and go to work. A student has feelings for someone new, and it feels the same as it did before, and this time – this time! - she will do things differently; she already is. A friend’s marriage ended last autumn, and when the dank darkness of these evenings crept in and grabbed him around the solar plexus, his mind sank under the weight of old disappointments, embodied memories returning with this loop of the turning earth. But there is no place for shame this time, and he goes to bed early; lies low to the wall; weathers the weather. Small victories, every day, everywhere.

Life is patterned and looped. Some patterns are wrought greatly around us: the seasons, the night and day, the mystery of bodies. Others we make over generations, or in our day-to-day, our webs of love and struggle, joy and fear, purpose and ennui. Often enough, when life is hard and we are simply trying to survive, we cannot spot the patterns. They are making themselves, with our hearts and minds the raw materials. But we are a self-reflective species, and so there always comes a moment when something rises up out of the chaos, some line of form or structure, and we see it and think oh. That’s what that is about. Or, in the case of Elizabeth Strout’s Bob Burgess, I need to stop smoking with Lucy Barton.  

I am not talking, here, about the kind of pattern-spotting that makes us frightened, our primitive brains using their predictions of disaster to bully us into acquiescence or silence or sabotage. Rather, I am talking about the pattern-spotting that can emerge only when there is enough space and safety, when the sky is big enough that the flock of geese emerges clearly against a background blue. This kind of space and safety is a million small pauses in the moments you most want to be fast, a thousand tiny acts of trust in yourself or others, a hundred gestures of willingness to turn towards that which makes you want to flee: feelings, challenges, feuds. Space and safety are built slowly, step by small step, and also, sometimes, all at once.

It is the impossibility of nailing down this process that makes life an art form, and humans complex. We cannot catch and capture forever the perfect pattern. ‘You must change your life,’ wrote Rilke, and this is true, and yet our changes will never arm us intractably against future sorrow or pain. It is more that when we find ourselves in another painful loop, we know we need not complete it; that the way to do things differently is, simply, to do them differently; and that each fragment of patience or kindness or honesty we can bring to bear just a little more than last time – with ourselves, or with each other – offers a vista beyond the loop: hope.

And how to be patient, or kind, or honest? Watch the geese fly, wrap yourself warm against the chill, feed yourself in body and mind, tell the truth to yourself and others, look for patterns of greater beauty and follow them, holding them lightly in the fingers of your gloved hands.

Warm wishes for this chilly weekend,

Kitty